Friends reruns also got the HDTV rescans. In some shows you can see things that weren't supposed to be on-camera in the 4:3 format.

It's just a matter of which shows are worth the cost and time to do it.

They did this to some of the star trek series. Some scenes you can see things that were not meant to be seen. E.g. here Kirk and Khan are arguing, and then suddenly two people dressed like them start fighting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=B_c...

I can't find it now, but I believe they even redid some of the early CG effects by just rerendering the old models with modern software. It's worth preserving that kind of stuff for future generations. One of my favorite video games was rereleased over a decade later with updated graphics. Sadly they had to recreate everything from scratch because the original files were lost. And the original models were very high detail. They just converted to 2d and down sampled a ton because of the limitations of PCs at the time.

What is the vid you send supposed to show?

I think the point the parent was trying to make was that 4K resolution can be detrimental. You can plainly see that the two actors that play the original characters didn't actually perform the fight scene. In the original broadcast the resolution was so low that makeup and effects didn't really have to be that great in order to work.

Agree with this statement. Future-proofing was, however, a happy side-effect.

For movies yes, but for TV at that time a lot was with video cameras.